Remote communication with meters is known, for example, for home load control and for usage monitoring. Commands for home load control are typically transmitted over telephone lines or power lines. Communicating via power lines or telephone lines is slow and subject to physical disruption. Moreover, communicating via power lines or telephone lines presents the possibility of spurious signals, cross-talk, and other interference. One-way or two-way radios are also sometimes used. Both are expensive and two-way radios also require a license.
With regard to usage monitoring, on the other hand, utility meters are normally read by a person visiting the meter. In recent years, a number of schemes have been contemplated to accumulate usage data, as by counting wheel revolutions per unit time and storing such information as a preliminary necessity for actually automatically transmitting such information upon command of a remote central station.
Local area networks that interconnect via cables are also known. These networks are expensive to install and somewhat intrusive in that cables must be run to physically interconnect the various nodes in the network. Moreover, networks that are interconnected with cables are subject to physical disruption of the cables.
Recently, wireless networks have been developed. These networks can be used to collect information from, and to disseminate information to individual nodes of the network. For example, conventional wireless networks generally operate using a loop configuration in which each node in the network is interconnected and communicates only with two neighboring nodes. Information and/or commands are passed from node to node around the loop until they arrive at a master node. The master node is used to communicate information that is gathered to a central station, or to accept and distribute information received from a central station throughout the network.
Conventional wireless networks, however, have limitations as well. For example, because conventional wireless networks generally have a loop configuration, when one node is disabled, the integrity of the entire network is affected. Moreover, if the master node of such a conventional network is disabled, the network becomes isolated.
These and other drawbacks exist with current systems.